One of the reasons why Buffy worked was that it didn’t take itself completely seriously. That is, it didn’t take itself seriously so that it could take itself seriously.

If it weren’t for the parts where Buffy poked fun at itself and highlighted the cheesyness of the genre and made fun of certain storytelling cliches associated with the genre then it wouldn’t have had the ability to be serious when it wasn’t poking fun at itself.

I have no idea if what I just wrote was even coherent. It’s coherent in my mind, at least. And that’s all that counts to me!

Also, I feel there’s three distinct phases of Buffy rather than two. There’s the high school years, there’s the college years and then there’s the grown up years. The grown up years does not have a clear boundary as with the high-school/college years. To me, the grown up period is marked by Xander getting his own apartment and by Buffy’s mom dying.

Well, it’s kind of an interesting problem, and I certainly oversimplified it above. For me, at its heart, Buffy was always about conceptualizing the growth process. I agree with Evan above about the three phases “high school college, and adult.” And based on that view of the story, there are plenty of areas of growth and maturity that had never been explored in the show that could be carried on. So by that metric, there is room for the Buffy story to continue being told.

I don’t really see anything resembling that in Angel, but I’ll stick to Buffy because it’s by far the more borderline of the two (well, borderline in my view, though I can see obviously not in yours).

I’ll also go on to say that I’m not trying to convince you that Buffy shouldn’t be a comic. I’m just trying to coherently express the reason that I personally don’t like the story continuing..

I think that for me it’s not just a matter of the story not having anywhere else to go. Every story will always have somewhere else to go. That’s just the nature of story endings. They’re only endings in the sense that that is the point where the story stops being told. There’s a saying that I agree with, and I don’t know it goes verbatim, but I know the gist. It goe something like this: Cinderella is only as great a story as it is because it stops before we get to the part where her marriage with the prince falls apart.

And, I mean, there’s no guarantee that the Cinderella story goes bad, but because it DOES end where it does, we don’t have to suffer with finding out. If the marriage does stay good, then all it does is unnecessarily confirm that the wedding would have been an honest place to have a happy ending. If the marriage does go bad, then it cheapens everything in the story that moved in the direction of getting them together.

This gets to a kind of philosophical question of when the right place for a story to end is. For the Cinderella example, it kinds of ends because of a lot of storytelling catch-22s.

But for me, the essence of it is that I story should end when it has come to terms with itself. The Buffy series, in my opinion, had come to terms with the Buffy story by that final episode. Buffy had grown into a woman, she had accepted her mothers’ death, she had learned to be a sister and a role model without having to be a surrugate mother, she had grown comfortable with herself as a leader AND as a peer. Even the other characters had come to terms with their storylines. Xander had grown up. Willow had healed enough from Tara’s death to move on with her life. And so on. I just very strongly feel that the story had come to terms with itself in as many aspects as you could reasonably expect it to do that.

It was a good ending. It was a place where, as a storyteller, I feel that I would have to come to terms with leaving the story where it was, no matter how much I loved it. The story could keep going. Organically speaking, it does keep going. But the story as “told” had reached a place where all of the pieces that had been motion came to rest. Where the inertia of the story was at rest. Where starting it up again isn’t natural so much as it is forceful.

Like I said, as much of this, for me, is sort of resentfulness stemming from the fact that I don’t think Whedon is doing what I know I’m going to have to do when I get to the point where my stories are individually told. Will I want to stop telling them, individually? I can’t imagine that I will. But should I? I honestly, sincerely, deeply believe that I should… that any storyteller should…

Suuuuuuure.